Sunday, April 08, 2007

A cliffnotes on news 2.0 for Sam Zell

Sam Zell might have made his billions in the real estate business, he knows exactly what the RIAA people knew about the net, nothing.

He is making the same old useless tirade about the search engines stealing the papers’ content.

A quick primer for Mr. Zell:

1. The aggregators/news search engines do not carry ads.
2. The aggregators/news search engines help bring traffic to the news sites.
3. The aggregators/news search engines help readers make informed decisions by showing up a broad choice of headlines on a particular story. Why are you afraid when you can boast of quality. If you are not for quality or exclusiveness, how long do you thing you can survive in the news business?
4. There are a million (maybe more) news outlets in the online world. How do you guess readers will come to your site?
5. Every reader is also a news publisher.
6. Google does not make much money stealing others’ content. Maybe , he can start with reading this guide from Seomoz.

Update (10/4/2207)

Donna Bogatin writes that Google News is NOT newspaper driven, meaning its core business is search.

I forgot to mention that Google news also includes blogs and other small news sites, which are thankful for the traffic.

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2 Comments:

At 7:26 PM , Blogger Unknown said...

Before dismissing him, consider for a moment that the billionaire has some experience and insight of value. I actually think Sam Zell has a point, and I've explained why on my blog.

One clarification of your post:

Google News does make money from posting the news. By driving up links to newspaper Web sites, loads of remnant inventory is created on those sites. Since local advertisers have no interest in these one-off page views, the remnant space is most often filled with Google AdSense ads. This isn't coincidence. Google understands the effect of driving up remnant inventory via Google News.

All multi-billion dollar companies are in it for the money, Google included. They're not featuring Google News prominently on their ever-so-sparse home page just to be nice.

 
At 2:39 PM , Blogger Pramit Singh said...

Good point, Lucas.

However, don't you think that Sam Zell's position about Google 'stealing' is an oversimplification?

 

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